Checklist — which agency is right for us
Before choosing an agency there is something to settle first: whether you need somewhere to run ads, or somewhere to grow the brand with you. That is why the same agency produces 500% ROAS for one brand and changes nothing for another. The agency’s ability did not change — the range it was allowed to touch did.
Every agency has a shape it is good at. Take in every enquiry and pass it down to team members, and that shape disappears. When mismatched pairings pile up, both the brand and the agency struggle.
Work through the 13 items below. They show which side fits your brand, and whether you are in a state to turn advertising on at all. Use them as they are even if you end up meeting someone other than us.
First three
If any one applies, ad operations fits you better than growth
This has nothing to do with your score. It is not about being good or bad — the service you need is simply different.
Then there is very little we can do. The product pages, the members and the data all sit on the platform’s side, so there is no way to move on evidence. This does not mean close it today. It does mean that growing a brand eventually requires running an owned store at the centre.
We start by asking why you began the brand. The founder is the only person who can answer that. This does not mean you take on the hands-on work — it means you need to be in the room where direction is set.
Judging a single creative takes at least seven days. Three months is not enough to see even one cycle. If a conclusion has to land inside that window, what fits is an agency that runs ad operations, not growth or performance.
10 checks
What can you see right now?
Without this number there is no way to tell whether advertising is growing the brand or eating it.
Advertising is switched on in order to be switched off one day. If you can answer this, it means your owned channels are already working.
If what the creative promised is not on the first screen, drop-off clusters early. You have to see this stretch to know whether to fix the creative or the page.
Can you fix things other than the advertising?
Advertising is not persuasion, it is amplification. If there is a reason to buy it grows that reason; if there is none it confirms the absence faster.
If it takes two weeks through a production vendor, the month rolls over without you knowing what worked.
If average order value cannot support the ad spend, changing ten creatives will not produce an answer. Changing one bundle is often far faster.
These are the mechanisms that bring a first-time buyer back. A channel that only sends discount messages becomes noise, not an asset.
Does the brand have a reason?
Eight tenths of efficiency is decided where the product meets the market. That is not a gap creative can fill.
Without this you start from zero every time you make a creative. Eventually you end up following whatever everyone else is saying.
That reason becomes the appeal of your next creative and the line that goes at the top of the product page. Without it you have to keep buying new traffic.
If you are being compared on price alone inside the same shopping section, you are still closer to a product than a brand. Things change once searches start arriving by brand name.
How far do you intend to go?
The reason you turn advertising on is to be able to turn it off. Chase short-term revenue alone and the budget keeps climbing while nothing accumulates in the brand. Even 300% ROAS is not a destination — it is the point where a brand can barely stand on its own.
Nothing you enter is stored anywhere. It is calculated on this screen only.
There are four possible results
What you need now is ad operations, not growth — when any one of the three above applies
Growth only works when three things are in place: an owned store you can actually change, a founder who sets direction, and at least one full cycle of time. Miss any one of them and there is no environment for moving on evidence. For now an approach other than data-led work will serve you better. That said, growing a brand eventually requires running an owned store at the centre. Taking on work we are not good at and passing it down to a team member is, we think, the worst outcome for both sides. When the conditions are in place, you are welcome to check again.
There is something to do before advertising — 0–4 items
Advertising is not persuasion, it is amplification. If there is a reason to buy, it grows that reason; if there is none, it only confirms the absence faster and louder. Raising the budget gives the same result, just sooner. What you need to answer first is not which creative works, but why anyone should buy your product. Fill in the unchecked items from the top down — they are ordered so that the earlier ones unlock the later ones.
You only need to close a few gaps — 5–7 items
The basic structure is in place, but it is leaking in a few spots. Raise the budget in this state and the leak grows with it. The unchecked items are where it is leaking now, and closing just two or three usually changes efficiency at the same budget. Increasing spend comes after that.
We should talk — 8–10 items
Because repeat purchase rate and non-ad revenue are visible, you can decide where to put money on evidence. Because product pages, pricing and CRM can move together, problems that creative alone cannot solve become solvable. Because the brand has a reason to exist, the axis holds even across many versions of a creative. At this level we can look at the whole brand cycle rather than a single creative. Once peak and off seasons, good years and bad years stack up on the same data, judgement gets faster.
Contact
Whatever your result, feel free to ask. Press the button and your check results are copied — just paste them into the chat. If after review we judge that we are not the right fit, we will explain why.
If you write in your owned store address, the ad channels you currently run, and what led you to create the brand, we can answer far more concretely.
Get in touch →Press to copy the details worth sending us.
What we actually do is set out on the service page, the brands we have worked with are in the introduction, and the perspective we judge from is in the marketing articles.
